“I checked.”
“What’s she got against you?” I asked Drake.
“That’s personal,” Kay said gruffly, and crossed his arms.
“No, that’s all right, I think Mr. LaCrosse deserves to know so he won’t think we’re keeping relevant secrets.” Drake paused a moment to organize his thoughts. “Megan is only my half sister. She believes, and sadly she may be correct, that my father raped our mother to conceive me. Only my former adviser Cameron Kern knows for sure, and he refused to discuss it with me.”
“That’s one of the reasons,” Kay interjected, “he’s now a former adviser.”
“Bob,” Drake said warningly. “At any rate, Megan is two years older than me, so she remembers how being thought of as the king’s whore affected our late mother. And on top of that, she left the island as a young woman and became a moon priestess, and we all know their opinion of men in general. Because of all that, she feels I deserve the punishment my father never received in his lifetime.”
“Awkward to have treasonous family,” I agreed.
Drake smiled with a sad little sigh. “Yes.”
“And entirely beside the point,” Kay said. “I’ll look over the guest list and see if any of them have traveled outside Grand Bruan recently, to somewhere they might acquire shatternight.”
“What about the other knights?” I asked. “Have any of them been off the island?”
“Three of them went to Sartoba to help train their army,” Kay said. “They got back two days before this incident.”
“Check it out,” Drake said. Kay nodded. To me the king asked, “Anything else?”
Your sister isn’t the only moon priestess in your family, I could’ve said. But I decided this wasn’t the best time. “I’ll let you know as soon as anything occurs to me.”
“Good. Let’s talk again in a bit after I’ve cleaned up and visited Jennifer. I owe her some private time, especially since we’ll have to hold court very soon and make some public statement.”
Kay and I both bowed, and Drake continued up the staircase. Just before he reached the next landing, he stopped. “And, Mr. LaCrosse? There’s a very good doctor here. Gladstone, I believe is her name. Go see her about that hand, and tell her I sent you. She’ll fix you right up.” Then Drake disappeared upstairs.
I turned to Kay and grinned. “Have to obey the king, you know.”
“I’ll send Gillian with you again,” Kay said. “To watch your back and such. Make sure you don’t get ambushed again.”
“Please, no. His charm is too overpowering.”
Kay laughed. “You got that right.”
“Besides, Agravaine’s not the kind to try something in broad daylight. He’s like a cockroach, he needs shadows to function. I noticed he wasn’t in the hall when Drake arrived.”
“You can be sure Marc noticed, too. All right, I’ll take you down to the infirmary. Come on.”
NINE
The infirmary consisted of one big room filled with cots, and a smaller room for examinations. In the glow from the windows Iris was even more breathtaking. Her black hair, deliciously tousled the previous evening, was now neatly parted and combed, and a touch of artificial color shone on her eyelids and lips. Her white coat was immaculate, and beneath it she wore a powder-blue gown. The calves revealed below the hem were certainly good medicine for me. She sat writing something on a jar’s label before she put it on a shelf. Then she turned, saw me, and smiled.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” she said as she stood. Then she spotted my hand and scowled. “Well, that tells me you didn’t follow doctor’s orders. What happened?”
“I used it to make a point. Emphatically.”
“I bet it hurt.”
“It sure got my attention.”
She smiled knowingly. It was only adorable. “You know what’s ironic? First thing this morning I saw a broken nose that had also gotten twice as bad overnight. Damnedest thing. Two self-increasing injuries in one day.”
“Something must be going around,” I agreed.
“Bob, take those manacles off. And step outside, will you?”
“I think I should stay-”
She gave him a significant look. “Bob.”
Kay sighed, unshackled me, and went back out into the hall. He closed the door, but left a small gap. “Close it all the way, Bob!” Iris called. He did.
She nodded toward the examination table. “Now hop up there, little boy. I should warn you, though, that if you’re going to keep playing so rough, I’ll have to speak to your father.”
I jumped onto the edge of the table. She lifted my hand and gingerly pushed my sleeve up my arm. When she ran her fingertips lightly over the bruise, I winced. She said, “That tough-guy veneer really is just skin-deep, isn’t it?”
“If that.”
“You can cry if you want to, I’ll never tell. Now wiggle your fingers.” I did so, and she pushed on a couple of them. “I think you did some real damage this time, soldier. You need a cast.”
As she poured fresh water into a basin and placed it on the table beside me, I said, “I noticed that the beds in the other room were all empty. How’s the girl Mary?”
“She left. Said she wanted nothing more to do with castles and knights.”
My professionalism managed to get my attention. “And you let her? She was a witness to a murder.”
She shrugged as she withdrew a roll of cloth and began cutting it into strips. “She wasn’t my prisoner.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“Back to whatever small town she was plucked from, I suppose. She’ll probably marry her childhood sweetheart and start squeezing out babies.”
I said nothing. Mary probably couldn’t tell us anything else, but then again, maybe I hadn’t asked the right questions. I wondered if Agravaine had gotten to her.
Iris said, “I heard King Marcus is here.”
“Yeah, he got in this morning. Gave me a royal command to come see you, in fact, when he saw my hand.”
She poured some white powder into the water, and it immediately turned cloudy. “That’s a relief. He’s a good man, and he’ll straighten out these metal-plated idiots before someone else gets seriously hurt.”
Since my career as a knight was aborted pretty early, I never had the luxury of fighting directly for king and country. Certainly I had never served under anyone who inspired the loyalty of Marcus Drake. My warrior years were spent as a mercenary, a sword-for-hire battling for anyone who paid me. I didn’t care who the enemy was, or why we were at war with them. During those years I killed lots of people with no more thought than I’d have swatting a fly.
And our medical facilities were nonexistent. If we got cut, we stitched each other, and if we got stabbed anywhere vital, we died. If we were too wounded to fight, we were dumped: no parades, no medal ceremonies, no bards singing of our deeds. Certainly no neat rows of beds in an airy, clean castle, or beautiful young doctors to bolster both our flesh and our spirits.
As Iris checked on the progress of the thickening liquid in the bowl, I said, “So Agravaine came to see you?”
She nodded. “He said he ran into a door going to pee in the middle of the night. I don’t think his nose will ever set right now.”
“That’s too bad.”
She smiled again. I could watch her do that all day. “Treating his injuries is always a pleasure. I look forward to his final one.”
“That’s a bit callous.”
“Doctors have to be callous. If we got emotionally involved with our patients, we’d go nuts.”
That wasn’t terribly different from the way a soldier had to think; it was one reason I was no longer a soldier. “So you never get involved with patients?”
“Never,” she said at once. She dipped one of the cloth strips in the bowl, then draped it over my knuckles. It was wet and heavy, and she immediately overlapped it with another. She pressed the dangling ends against my skin, and they stuck there. She began threading strips between my puffy fingers.